1. Introduction 1.
1 Is the contemporary city like the contemporary airport—"all the a zone of potential value—a kind of pre-historical condition that might finally be worthy
same"? Is it possible to theorize this convergence? And if so, to what ultimate configu-
ration is it aspiring? Convergence is possible only at the price of shedding identity. That
is usually seen as a loss. But at the scale at which it occurs, it must mean something. What
are the disadvantages of identity, and conversely, what are the advantages of blankness?
What if this seemingly accidental—and usually regretted—homogenization were an
intentional process, a conscious movement away from difference toward similarity?
What if we are witnessing a global liberation movement: "down with character!" What
is left after identity is stripped? The Generic? 1,2 To the extent that identity is derived
from physical substance, from the historical, from context, from the real, we somehow
cannot imagine that anything contemporary—made by us—contributes to it. But the fact
that human growth is exponential implies that the past will at some point become too
"small" to be inhabited and shared by those alive. We ourselves exhaust it. To the extent
thathistory finds its deposit in architecture, presenthuman quantities will inevitably burst
and deplete previous substance. Identity conceived as this form of sharing the past is
a losing proposition: not only is there—in a stable model of continuous population expan-
sion— proportionally less and less to share, but history also has an invidious half-life—
as it is more abused, it becomes less significant—to the point where its diminishing hand-
outs become insulting. This thinning is exacerbated by the constantly increasing mass of
tourists, an avalanche that, in a perpetual quest for "character," grinds successful identities
down to meaningless dust. 1,3 Identity is like a mousetrap in which more and more
mice have to share the original bait, and which, on closer inspection, may have been
empty for centuries. The stronger identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expan-
sion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction. Identity becomes like a lighthouse—fixed,
overdetermined: it can change its position or the pattern it emits only at the cost of de-
stabilizing navigation. (Paris can only become more Parisian—it is already on its way to
becoming hyper-Paris, a polished caricature. There are exceptions: London—its only
identity a lack of clear identity—is perpetually becoming even less London, more open,
less static.) 1,4 Identity centralizes; it insists on an essence, a point. Its tragedy is given
in simple geometric terms. As the sphere of influence expands, the area characterized
by the center becomes larger and larger, hopelessly diluting both the strength and the
authority of the core; inevitably the distance between center and circumference increases
to the breaking point In this perspective, the recent, belated discovery of the periphery as
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of architectural attention—is only a disguised insistence on the priority of and dependency
on the center: without center, no periphery; the interest of the first presumably compen-
sates for the emptiness of the latter. Conceptually orphaned, the condition of the periph-
ery is made worse by the fact that its mother is still alive, stealing the show, emphasiz-
ing its offspring's inadequacies. The last vibes emanating from the exhausted center
preclude the reading of the periphery as a critical mass. Not only is the center by defin-
ition too small to perform its assigned obligations, it is also no longer the real center but
an overblown mirage on its way to implosion; yet its illusory presence denies the rest
of the city its legitimacy. {Manhattan denigrates as "bridge-and-tunnel people" those who
need infrastructural support to enter the city, and makes them pay for it.) The persistence
of the present concentric obsession makes us all bridge-and-tunnel people, second-class
citizens in our own civilization, disenfranchised by the dumb coincidence of our collec-
tive exile from the center. 1,5 In our concentric programming (author spent part of his
youth in Amsterdam, city of ultimate centrality) the insistence on the center as the core
of value and meaning, font of all significance, is doubly destructive—not only is the ever-
increasing volume of dependencies an ultimately intolerable strain, it also means that the
center has to be constantly maintained, i.e., modernized. As "the most important place,"
it paradoxically has to be, at the same time, the most old and the most new, the most fixed
and the most dynamic; it undergoes the most intense and constant adaptation, which is
then compromised and complicated by the fact that it has to be an unacknowledged trans-
formation, invisible to the naked eye. (The city of Zurich has found the most radical,
expensive solution in reverting to a kind of reverse archaeology: layer after layer of new
modernities—shopping centers, parking, banks, vaults, laboratories—are constructed
underneath the center. The center no longer expands outward or skyward, but inward
toward the center of the earth itself.) From the grafting of more or less discreet traffic
arteries, bypasses, underground tunnels, the construction of ever more tangentiales,
to the routine transformation of housing into offices, warehouses into lofts, abandoned
churches into nightclubs, from the serial bankruptcies and subsequent reopenings of
specific units in more and more expensive shopping precincts to the relentless conver-
sion of utilitarian space into "public" space, pedestrianization, the creation of new parks,
planting, bridging, exposing, the systematic restoring of historic mediocrity, all authen-
ticity is relentlessly evacuated. 1.6 The Generic City is the city liberated from the
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captivity of center, from the straitjacket of identity. The Generic City breaks with this
destructive cycle of dependency: it is nothing but a reflection of present need and present
ability. It is the city without history. It is big enough for everybody. It is easy. It does not
need maintenance. If it gets too small it just expands. If it gets old it just self-destructs
and renews. It is equally exciting—or unexciting—everywhere. It is "superficial"—like a
pvmmMi
Hollywood studio lot, it can produce a new identity every Monday morning. gJjjmMira
2,1 The Generic City has grown dramatically over the past few decades. Not only has its
size increased, its numbers have too. In the early seventies it was inhabited by an aver-
age of 2,5 million official (and ±500,000 unofficial) residents; now it hovers around the
15 million mark. 2,2 Did the Generic City start in America? Is it so profoundly unorig-
inal that it can only be imported? In any case, the Generic City now also exists in Asia,
Europe, Australia, Africa. The definitive move away from the countryside, from agri-
culture, to the city is not a move to the city as we knew it: it is a move to the Generic City,
the city so pervasive that it has come to the country. 2,3 Some continents, like Asia, aspire
to the Generic City; others are ashamed by it. Because it tends toward the tropical—
converging around the equator—a large proportion of Generic Cities is Asian—seem-
ingly a contradiction in terms: the over-familiar inhabited by the inscrutable. One day it
will be absolutely exotic again, this discarded product of Western civilization, through
the resemanticization that its very dissemination brings in its wake... 2,4 Sometimes an
old, singular city, like Barcelona, by oversimplifying its identity, turns Generic. It
becomes transparent, like a logo. The reverse never happens... at least not yet. ^^^^^^
3.1 The Generic City is what is left after large sections of urban life crossed over to
cyberspace. It is a place of weak and distended sensations, few and far between emotions,
discreet and mysterious like a large space lit by a bed lamp. Compared to the classical
city, the Generic City is sedated, usually perceived from a sedentary position. Instead of
concentration—simultaneous presence—in the Generic City individual "moments" are
spaced far apart to create a trance of almost unnoticeable aesthetic experiences: the color
variations in the fluorescent lighting of an office building just before sunset, the sub-
tleties of the slightly different whites of an illuminated sign at night. Like Japanese food,
the sensations can be reconstituted and intensified in the mind, or not—they may sim-
ply be ignored. (There's a choice.) This pervasive lack of urgency and insistence acts like
a potent drug; it induces a hallucination of the normal. 3.2 In a drastic reversal of what
is supposedly the' major characteristic of the city—"business"—the dominant sensation
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of the Generic City is an eerie calm: the calmer it is, the more it approximates the pure
state. The Generic City addresses the "evils" that were ascribed to the traditional city
before our love for it became unconditional. The serenity of the Generic City is achieved
by the evacuation of the public realm, as in an emergency fire drill. The urban plane
now only accommodates necessary movement, fundamentally the car; highways are
a superior version of boulevards and plazas, taking more and more space; their design,
seemingly aiming for automotive efficiency, is in fact surprisingly sensual, a utilitarian
pretense entering the domain of smooth space. What is new about this locomotive public
realm is that it cannot be measured in dimensions. The same (let's say ten-mile) stretch
yields a vast number of utterly different experiences: it can last five minutes or forty;
it can be shared with almost nobody, or with the entire population; it can yield the absolute
pleasure of pure, unadulterated speed—at which point the sensation of the Generic City
may even become intense or at least acquire density—or utterly claustrophobic moments
of stoppage—at which point the thinness of the Generic City is at its most noticeable.
3.3 The Generic City is fractal, an endless repetition of the same simple structural mod-
ule; it is possible to reconstruct it from its smallest entity, a desktop computer, maybe even
a diskette. 3.4 Golf courses are all that is left of otherness. 3.5 The Generic City has easy
phone numbers, not the resistant ten-figure frontal-lobe crunchers of the traditional city
but smoother versions, their middle numbers identical, for instance. 3.6 Its main attrac-
tion is its anomie. ^^^^^Q 4,1 Once manifestations of ultimate neutrality, airports
now are among the most singular, characteristic elements of the Generic City, its strongest
vehicle of differentiation. They have to be, being all the average person tends to experi-
ence of a particular city. Like a drastic perfume demonstration, photomurals, vegetation,
local costumes give a first concentrated blast of the local identity (sometimes it is also
the last). Far away, comfortable, exotic, polar, regional, Eastern, rustic, new, even "undis-
covered": those are the emotional registers invoked. Thus conceptually charged, airports
become emblematic signs imprinted on the global collective unconscious in savage
manipulations of their non-aviatic attractors—tax-free shopping, spectacular spatial
qualities, the frequency and reliability of their connections to other airports. In terms of
its iconography/performance, the airport is a concentrate of both the hyper-local and
hyper-global—hyper-global in the sense you can get goods there that are not available
even in the city, hyper-local in the sense you can get things there that you get nowhere
else. 4.2 The tendency in airport gestalt is toward ever-greater autonomy: sometimes
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they're even practically unrelated to a specific Generic City. Becoming bigger and big-
ger, equipped with more and more facilities unconnected to travel, they are on the way
to replacing the city. The in-transit condition is becoming universal. Together, airports
contain populations of millions—plus the largest daily workforce. In the completeness
of their facilities, they are like quarters of the Generic City, sometimes even its reason
for being (its center?), with the added attraction of being hermetic systems from which
there is no escape—except to another airport. 4.3 The date/age of the Generic City can
be reconstructed from a close reading of its airport's geometry. Hexagonal plan (in unique
cases penta-or heptagonal): six ties. Orthogonal plan and section: seventies. Collage City:
eighties. A single curved section, endlessly extruded in a linear plan: probably nineties.
(Its structure branching out like an oak tree: Germany.) 4,4 Airports come in two sizes:
too big and too small. Yet their size has no influence on their performance. This suggests
that the most intriguing aspect of all infrastructures is their essential elasticity. Calculated
by the exact for the numbered—passengers per year—they are invaded by the countless
and survive, stretched toward ultimate indeterminacy. ^^^^^^^Q 5.1 The Generic
City is seriously multiracial, on average 8% black, 12% white, 27% Hispanic, 37%
Chinese/Asian, 6% indeterminate, 10% other. Not only multiracial, also multicultural.
That's why it comes as no surprise to see temples between the slabs, dragons on the main
boulevards, Buddhas in the CBD (central business district). 5.2 The Generic City is
always founded by people on the move, poised to move on. This explains the insubstan-
tiality of their foundations. Like the flakes that are suddenly formed in a clear liquid by
joining two chemical substances, eventually to accumulate in an uncertain heap on the
bottom, the collision or confluence of two migrations—Cuban emigres going north and
Jewish retirees going south, for instance, both ultimately on their way someplace else—
establishes, out of the blue, a settlement. A Generic City is born, 6, Urbanism 16.1 The
great originality of the Generic City is simply to abandon what doesn't work—what has
outlived its use—to break up the blacktop of idealism with the jackhammers of realism
and to accept whatever grows in its place. In that sense, the Generic City accommodates
both the primordial and the futuristic—in fact, only these two. The Generic City is all
that remains of what used to be the city. The Generic City is the post-city being prepared
on the site of the ex-city. 6.2 The Generic City is held together, not by an over-demand-
ing public realm—progressively debased in a surprisingly long sequence in which the
Roman Forum is to the Greek agora what the shopping mall is to the high street—but by
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the residual. In the original model of the moderns, the residual was merely green, its
controlled neatness a moralistic assertion of good intentions, discouraging association,
use. In the Generic City, because the crust of its civilization is so thin, and through its
immanent tropicality, the vegetal is transformed into Edenic Residue, the main carrier of
its identity: a hybrid of politics and landscape. At the same time refuge of the illegal, the
uncontrollable, and subject of endless manipulation, it represents a simultaneous triumph
of the manicured and the primeval. Its immoral rashness compensates for the Generic
City's other poverties. Supremely inorganic, the organic is the Generic City's strongest
myth. 6.3 The street is dead. That discovery has coincided with frantic attempts at its
resuscitation. Public art is everywhere—as if two deaths make a life. Pedestrianization—
intended to preserve—merely channels the flow of those doomed to destroy the object
of their intended reverence with their feet. 6.4 The Generic City is on its way from hori-
zontality to vertically. The skyscraper looks as if it will be the final, definitive typology.
It has swallowed everything else. It can exist anywhere: in a rice field, or downtown—it
makes no difference anymore. The towers no longer stand together; they are spaced so
that they don't interact. Density in isolation is the ideal. 6.5 Housing is not a problem.
It has either been completely solved or totally left to chance; in the first case it is legal,
in the second "illegal"; in the first case, towers or, usually, slabs (at the most, 15 meters
deep), in the second (in perfect complementarity) a crust of improvised hovels. One solu-
tion consumes the sky, the other the ground. It is strange that those with the least money
inhabit the most expensive commodity—earth; those who pay, what is free—air. In either
case, housing proves to be surprisingly accommodating—not only does the population
double every so many years, but also, with the loosening grip of the various religions,
the average number of occupants per unit halves—through divorce and other family-
dividing phenomena—with the same frequency that the city's population doubles; as its
numbers swell, the Generic City's density is perpetually on the decrease. 6.6 All Generic
Cities issue from the tabula rasa; if there was nothing, now they are there; if there was
something, they have replaced it. They must, otherwise they would be historic. 6.7 The
Generic Cityscape is usually an amalgam of overly ordered sections—dating from near
the beginning of its development, when "the power" was still undiluted—and increas-
ingly free arrangements everywhere else. 6.8 The Generic City is the apotheosis of the
multiple-choice concept: all boxes crossed, an anthology of all the options. Usually the
Generic City has been "planned," not in the usual sense of some bureaucratic organization
1253
controlling its development, but as if various echoes, spores, tropes, seeds fell on the
ground randomly as in nature, took hold—exploiting the natural fertility of the terrain—
and now form an ensemble: an arbitrary gene pool that sometimes produces amazing
results. 6.9 The writing of the city may be indecipherable, flawed, but that does not mean
that there is no writing; it may simply be that we developed a new illiteracy, a new blind-
ness. Patient detection reveals the themes, particles, strands that can be isolated from the
seeming murkiness of this Wagnerian wr-soup: notes left on a blackboard by a visiting
genius 50 years ago, stenciled UN reports disintegrating in their Manhattan glass silo,
discoveries by former colonial thinkers with a keen eye for the climate, unpredictable
ricochets of design education gathering strength as a global laundering process. 6.10 The
best definition of the aesthetic of the Generic City is "free style." How to describe it?
Imagine an open space, a clearing in the forest, a leveled city. There are three elements:
roads, buildings, and nature; they coexist in flexible relationships, seemingly without
reason, in spectacular organizational diversity. Any one of the three may dominate: some-
times the "road" is lost—to be found meandering on an incomprehensible detour; some-
times you see no building, only nature; then, equally unpredictably, you are surrounded
only by building. In certain frightening spots, all three are simultaneously absent. On
these "sites" (actually, what is the opposite of a site? They are like holes bored through
the concept of city) public art emerges like the Loch Ness Monster, equal parts figura-
tive and abstract, usually self-cleaning. 6.11 Specific cities still seriously debate the mis-
takes of architects—for instance, their proposals to create raised pedestrian networks
with tentacles leading from one block to the next as a solution to congestion—but the
Generic City simply enjoys the benefits of their inventions: decks, bridges, tunnels,
motorways—a huge proliferation of the paraphernali a of connection—frequently draped
with ferns and flowers as if to ward off original sin, creating a vegetal congestion more
severe than a fifties science-fiction movie. 6,12 The roads are only for cars. People
(pedestrians) are led on rides (as in an amusement park), on "promenades" that lift them
off the ground, then subject them to a catalog of exaggerated conditions—wind, heat,
steepness, cold, interior, exterior, smells, fumes—in a sequence that is a grotesque cari-
cature of life in the historic city. 6.13 There is horizontally in the Generic City, but it is
on the way out. It consists either of history that is not yet erased or of Tudor-like enclaves
that multiply around the center as newly minted emblems of preservation. 6.14 Ironically,
though itself new, the Generic City is encircled by a constellation of New Towns: New
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Towns are like year-rings. Somehow, New Towns age very quickly, the way a five-year-
old child develops wrinkles and arthritis through the disease called progeria. 6.15 The
Generic City presents the final death of planning. Why? Not because it is not planned—
in fact, huge complementary universes of bureaucrats and developers funnel unimagin-
able flows of energy and money into its completion; for the same money, its plains can
be fertilized by diamonds, its mud fields paved in gold bricks... But its most dangerous
and most exhilarating discovery is that planning makes no difference whatsoever.
Buildings may be placed well (a tower near a metro station) or badly (whole centers miles
away from any road). They flourish/perish unpredictably. Networks become over-
stretched, age, rot, become obsolescent; populations double, triple, quadruple, suddenly
disappear. The surface of the city explodes, the economy accelerates, slows down, bursts,
collapses. Like ancient mothers that still nourish titanic embryos, whole cities are built
on colonial infrastructures of which the oppressors took the blueprints back home.
Nobody knows where, how, since when the sewers run, the exact location of the tele-
phone lines, what the reason was for the position of the center, where monumental axes
end. All it proves is that there are infinite hidden margins, colossal reservoirs of slack,
a perpetual, organic process of adjustment, standards, behavior; expectations change with
the biological intelligence of the most alert animal. In this apotheosis of multiple choice
it will never be possible again to reconstruct cause and effect. They work—that is all.
6,16 The Generic City's aspiration toward tropicality automatically implies the rejec-
tion of any lingering reference to the city as fortress, as citadel; it is open and accommo-
dating like a mangrove forest. 7. Politics 7,1 The Generic City has a (sometimes distant)
relationship with a more or less authoritarian regime—local or national. Usually the
cronies of the "leader"—whoever that was—decided to develop a piece of "downtown"
or the periphery, or even to start a new city in the middle of nowhere, and so triggered
the boom that put the city on the map. 7,2 Very often, the regime has evolved to a sur-
prising degree of invisibility, as if, through its very permissiveness, the Generic City
resists the dictatorial. ^^^^^^H B.I It is very surprising that the triumph of the
Generic City has not coincided with the triumph of sociology—a discipline whose "field"
has been extended by the Generic City beyond its wildest imagination. The Generic City
is sociology, happening. Each Generic City is a petri dish—or an infinitely patient black-
board on which almost any hypothesis can be "proven" and then erased, never again to
reverberate in the minds of its authors or its audience. 8.2 Clearly, there is a proliferation
1255
of communities — a sociological zapping—that resists a single overriding interpretation.
The Generic City is loosening every structure that made anything coalesce in the past,
8.3 While infinitely patient, the Generic City is also persistently resistant to speculation:
it proves that sociology may be the worst system to capture sociology in the making.
It outwits each established critique. It contributes huge amounts of evidence for and—in
even more impressive quantities—against each hypothesis. In A tower blocks lead to sui-
cide, in B to happiness ever after. In C they are seen as a first stepping stone toward eman-
cipation (presumably under some kind of invisible "duress," however), in D simply as
passe. Constructed in unimaginable numbers in K, they are being exploded in L.
Creativity is inexplicably high in E, nonexistent in F, G is a seamless ethnic mosaic,
H perpetually at the mercy of separatism, if not on the verge of civil war. Model Y will
never last because of its tampering with family structure, but Z flourishes—a word no
academic would ever apply to any activity in the Generic City—because of it. Religion
is eroded in V, surviving in W, transmuted in X. 8.4 Strangely, nobody has thought that
cumulatively the endless contradictions of these interpretations prove the richness of the
Generic City; that is the one hypothesis that has been eliminated in advance. 9, Quarters
9.1 There is always a quarter called Lipservice, where a minimum of the past is preserved:
usually it has an old train/tramway or double-decker bus driving through it, ringing omi-
nous bells—domesticated versions of the Flying Dutchman's phantom vessel. Its phone
booths are either red and transplanted from London, or equipped with small Chinese
roofs. Lipservice—also called Afterthought, Waterfront, Too Late, 42nd Street, simply
the Village, or even Underground—is an elaborate mythic operation: it celebrates
the past as only the recently conceived can. It is a machine. 9,2 The Generic City had a
past, once. In its drive for prominence, large sections of it somehow disappeared, first
unlamented—the past apparently was surprisingly unsanitary, even dangerous—then,
without warning, relief turned into regret. Certain prophets—long white hair, gray socks,
sandals—had always been warning that the past was necessary—a resource. Slowly,
the destruction machine grinds to a halt; some random hovels on the laundered Euclidean
plane are saved, restored to a splendor they never had... 9,3 In spite of its absence,
history is the major preoccupation, even industry, of the Generic City. On the liberated
grounds, around the restored hovels, still more hotels are constructed to receive
additional tourists in direct proportion to the erasure of the past. Its disappearance has
no influence on their numbers, or maybe it is just a last-minute rush. Tourism is now
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independent of destination... 9.4 Instead of specific memories, the associations the Generic
City mobilizes are general memories, memories of memories: if not all memories at the
same time, then at least an abstract, token memory, a deja vu that never ends, generic
memory. 9.5 In spite of its modest physical presence (Lipservice is never more than three
stories high: homage to/revenge of Jane Jacobs?) it condenses the entire past in a single
complex. History returns not as farce here, but as service: costumed merchants (funny
hats, bare midriffs, veils) voluntarily enact the conditions (slavery, tyranny, disease,
poverty, colony)—that their nation once went to war to abolish. Like a replicating virus,
worldwide, the colonial seems the only inexhaustible source of the authentic. 9.6 42nd
Street: ostensibly the places where the past is preserved, they are actually the places where
the past has changed the most, is the most distant—as if seen through the wrong end of
a telescope—or even completely eliminated. 9.7 Only the memory of former excess is
strong enough to charge the bland. As if they try to warm themselves at the heat of an
extinguished volcano, the most popular sites (with tourists, and in the Generic City that
includes everyone) are the ones once most intensely associated with sex and misconduct.
Innocents invade the former haunts of pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, transvestites, and to
a lesser degree, artists. Paradoxically, at the same moment that the information highway
is about to deliver pornography by the truckload to their living rooms, it is as if the expe-
rience of walking on these warmed-over embers of transgression and sin makes them
feel special, alive. In an age that does not generate new aura, the value of established aura
skyrockets. Is walking on these ashes the nearest they will get to guilt? Existentialism
diluted to the intensity of a Perrier? 9.8 Each Generic City has a waterfront, not neces-
sarily with water—it can also be with desert, for instance—but at least an edge where it
meets another condition, as if a position of near escape is the best guarantee for its enjoy-
ment. Here tourists congregate in droves around a cluster of stalls. Hordes of "hawkers"
try to sell them the "unique" aspects of the city. The unique parts of all Generic Cities
together have created a universal souvenir, scientific cross between Eiffel Tower, Sacre
Coeur, and Statue of Liberty: a tall building (usually between 200 and 300 meters)
drowned in a small ball of water with snow or, if close to the equator, gold flakes; diaries
with pockmarked leather covers; hippie sandals—even if real hippies are quickly repa-
triated. Tourists fondle these—nobody has ever witnessed a sale—and then sit down
in exotic eateries that line the waterfront: they run the full gamut of food today: spicy:
first and ultimately maybe most reliable indication of being elsewhere; party: beef or
1257
 synthetic; raw: atavistic practice that will be very popular in the third millennium. 9.9
Shrimp is the ultimate appetizer. Through the simplification of the food chain—and the
vicissitudes of preparation—they taste like english muffins, i.e., nothingness. 10, Program
10.1 Offices are still there, in ever greater numbers, in fact. People say they are no longer
necessary. In five to ten years we will all work at home. But then we will need bigger
homes, big enough to use for meetings. Offices will have to be converted to homes. 10,2
The only activity is shopping. But why not consider shopping as temporary, provisional?
It awaits better times. It is our own fault—we didn't think of anything better to do. The
same spaces inundated with other programs—libraries, baths, universities—would be
terrific; we would be awed by their grandeur. 10.3 Hotels are becoming the generic
accommodation of the Generic City, its most common building block. That used to be
the office—which .at least implied a coming and a going, assumed the presence of other
important accommodations elsewhere. Hotels are now containers that, in the expansion
and completeness of their facilities, make almost all other buildings redundant. Even
doubling as shopping malls, they are the closest we have to urban existence, 21st-century
style. 10.4 The hotel now implies imprisonment, voluntary house arrest; there is no
competing place left to go; you come and stay. Cumulatively, it describes a city of
ten million all locked in their rooms, a kind of reverse animation—density imploded.
^^^^^K^^^ 11,1 Close your eyes and imagine an explosion of beige. At its epi-
center splashes the color of vaginal folds (unaroused), metallic-matte aubergine, khaki-
tobacco, dusty pumpkin; all cars on their way to bridal whiteness... 11.2 There are inter-
esting and boring buildings in the Generic City, as in all cities. Both trace their ancestry
back to Mies van der Rohe: the first category to his irregular Friedrichstadt tower (1921),
the second to the boxes he conceived not long afterward. This sequence is important;
obviously, after initial experimentation, Mies made up his mind once and for all against
interest, for boredom. At best, his later buildings capture the spirit of the earlier work—
sublimated, repressed?—as a more or less noticeable absence, but he never proposed
"interesting" projects as possible buildings again. The Generic City proves him wrong:
its more daring architects have taken up the challenge Mies abandoned, to the point where
it is now hard to find a box. Ironically, this exuberant homage to the interesting Mies
shows that "the" Mies was wrong. 11.3 The architecture of the Generic City is by defi-
nition beautiful. Built at incredible speed, and conceived at even more incredible pace,
there is an average of 27 aborted versions for every realized—but that is not quite the
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term—structure. They are prepared in the 10,000 architectural offices nobody has ever
heard of, each vibrant with fresh inspiration. Presumably more modest than their well-
known colleagues, these offices are bonded by a collective awareness that something
is wrong with architecture that can only be rectified through their efforts. The power
of numbers gives them a splendid, shining arrogance. They are the ones who design
without any hesitation. They assemble, from 1,001 sources, with savage precision, more
riches than any genius ever could. On average, their education has cost 30,000 dollars,
excluding travel and housing. 23% have been laundered at American Ivy League univer-
sities, where they have been exposed—admittedly for very short periods—to the well-paid
elite of the other, "official" profession. It follows that a combined total investment of 300
billion dollars ($300,000,000,000) worth of architectural education ($30,000 [average
cost] x 100 [average numberof workers per office] x 100,000 [number of worldwide officesi)
is working in and producing Generic Cities at any moment. 11.4 Buildings that are com-
plex in form depend on the curtain-wall industry, on ever more effective adhesives and
sealants that turn each building into a mixture of straitjacket and oxygen tent. The use of
silicone—"we are stretching the facade as far as it will go"—has flattened all facades,
glued glass to stone to steel to concrete in a space-age impurity. These connections give
the appearance of intellectual rigor through the liberal application of a transparent spermy
compound that keeps everything together by intention rather than design—a triumph
of glue over the integrity of materials. Like everything else in the Generic City, its archi-
tecture is the resistant made malleable, an epidemic of yielding no longer through the
application of principle but through the systematic application of the unprincipled. 11.5
Because the Generic City is largely Asian, its architecture is generally air-conditioned;
this is where the paradox of the recent paradigm shift—the city no longer represents max-
imum development but borderline underdevelopment—becomes acute: the brutal means
by which universal conditioning is achieved mimic inside the building the climatic con-
ditions that once "happened" outside—sudden storms, mini-tornadoes, freezing spells
in the cafeteria, heat waves, even mist; a provincialism of the mechanical, deserted by
gray matter in pursuit of the electronic. Incompetence or imagination? 11.6 The irony is
that in this way the Generic City is at its most subversive, its most ideological; it elevates
mediocrity to a higher level; it is like Kurt Schwitter's Merzbau at the scale of the city:
the Generic City is aMerzcity. 11.7 The angle of the facades is the only reliable index
of architectural genius: 3 points for sloping backward, 12 points for sloping forward,
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2-point penalty for setbacks (too nostalgic), 11,8 The apparently solid substance of the
Generic City is misleading. 51% of its volume consists of atrium. The atrium is a dia-
bolical device in its ability to substantiate the insubstantial. Its Roman name is an eter-
nal guarantor of architectural class—its historic origins make the theme inexhaustible.
It accommodates the cave-dweller in its relentless provision of metropolitan comfort.
11,9 The atrium is void space: voids are the essential building block of the Generic City.
Paradoxically, its hollowness insures its very physicality, the pumping up of the volume
the only pretext for its physical manifestation. The more complete and repetitive its inte-
riors, the less their essential repetition is noticed. 11,10 The style of choice is postmodern,
and will always remain so. Postmodernism is the only movement that has succeeded in
connecting the practice of architecture with the practice of panic. Postmodernism is not
a doctrine based on a highly civilized reading of architectural history but a method,
a mutation in professional architecture that produces results fast enough to keep pace
with the Generic City's development. Instead of consciousness, as its original inventors
may have hoped, it creates a new unconscious. It is modernization's little helper. Anyone
can do it—a skyscraper based on the Chinese pagoda and/or a Tuscan hill town. 11,11
AU resistance to postmodernism is anti-democratic. It creates a "stealth" wrapping
around architecture that makes it irresistible, like a Christmas present from a charity.
11,12 Is there a connection between the predominance of mirror in the Generic City—
is it to celebrate nothingness through its multiplication or a desperate effort to capture
essences on then- way to evaporation?—and the "gifts" that, for centuries, were supposed
to be the most popular, efficient present for savages? 11,13 Maxim Gorky speaks in rela-
tion to Coney Island of "varied boredom." He clearly intends the term as an oxymoron.
Variety cannot be boring. Boredom cannot be varied. But the infinite variety of the
Generic City comes close, at least, to making variety normal: banalized, in a reversal of
expectation, it is repetition that has become unusual, therefore, potentially, daring, exhil-
arating. But that is for the 21st century. 12. Geography 12,1 The Generic City is in
a warmer than usual climate; it is on its way to the south—toward the equator—away
from the mess that the north made of the second millennium. It is a concept in a state of
migration. Its ultimate destiny is to be tropical—better climate, more beautiful people.
It is inhabited by those who do not lilce it elsewhere. 12.2 In the Generic City, people are
not only more beautiful than their peers, they are also reputed to be more even-tempered,
less anxious about work, less hostile, more pleasant—proof, in other words, that there
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is a connection between architecture and behavior, that the city can make better people
through as yet unidentified methods. 12,3 One of the most potent characteristics of the
Generic City is the stability of its weather—no seasons, outlook sunny—yet all forecasts
are presented in terms of imminent change and future deterioration: clouds in Karachi.
From the ethical and the religious, the issue of doom has shifted to the inescapable domain
of the meteorological. Bad weather is about the only anxiety that hovers over the Generic
City. 13-Itleniity 13,1 There is a calculated (?) redundancy in the iconography that the
Generic City adopts. If it is water-facing, then water-based symbols are distributed over
its entire territory. If it is a port, then ships and cranes will appear far inland. (However,
showing the containers themselves would make no sense: you can't particularize
the generic through the Generic.) If it is Asian, then "delicate" (sensual, inscrutable)
women appear in elastic poses, suggesting (religious, sexual) submission everywhere.
If it has a mountain, each brochure, menu, ticket, billboard will insist on the hill, as
if nothing less than a seamless tautology will convince. Its identity is like a mantra.
14, History 14,1 Regret about history *s absence is a tiresome reflex. It exposes an unspo-
ken consensus that history's presence is desirable. But who says that is the case? A city
is a plane inhabited in the most efficient way by people and processes, and in most cases,
the presence of history only drags down its performance... 14,2 History present obstructs
the pure exploitation of its theoretical value as absence. 14,3 Throughout the history of
humankind—to start a paragraph the American way—cities have grown through
aprocess of consolidation. Changes are made on the spot. Things are improved. Cultures
flourish, decay, revive, disappear, are sacked, invaded, humiliated, raped, triumph, are
reborn, have golden ages, fall suddenly silent— all on the same site. That is why archae-
ology is a profession of digging: it exposes layer after layer of civilization (i.e., city).
The Generic City, like a sketch which is never elaborated, is not improved but abandoned.
The idea of layering, intensification, completion are alien to it: it has no layers.
Its next layer takes place somewhere else, either next door—that can be the size of
a country—or even elsewhere altogether. The archaeologue (= archaeology with more
interpretation) of the 20th century needs unlimited plane tickets, not a shovel. 14.4 In
exporting/ejecting its improvements, the Generic City perpetuates its own amnesia
(its only link with eternity?). Its archaeology will therefore be the evidence of its pro-
gressive forgetting, the documentation of its evaporation. Its genius will be empty-
handed—not an emperor without clothes but an archaeologist without finds, or a site even.
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15. Infrastructure 15.1 Infrastructures, which were mutually reinforcing and totalizing,
are becoming more and more competitive and local; they no longer pretend to
create functioning wholes but now spin off functional entities. Instead of network and
organism, the new infrastructure creates enclave and impasse: no longer the grand recit
but the parasitic swerve. (The city of Bangkok has approved plans for three competing
airborne metro systems to get from A to B —may the strongest one win.) 15,2
Infrastructure is no longer a more or less delayed response to a more or less urgent need
but a strategic weapon, a prediction: Harbor X is not enlarged to serve a hinterland
of frantic consumers but to kill/reduce the chances that harbor Y will survive the 21st
century. On a single island, southern metropolis Z, still in its infancy, is "given" a new
subway system to make established metropolis W in the north look clumsy, congested,
and ancient. Life in V is smoothed to make life in U eventually unbearable. 16. Culture
16,1 Only the redundant counts. 16,2 In each time zone, there are at least three perfor-
mances of Cats. The world is surrounded by a Saturn's ring of meowing. 16,3 The city
used to be the great sexual hunting ground. The Generic City is like a dating agency: it
efficiently matches supply and demand. Orgasm instead of agony: there is progress. The
most obscene possibilities are announced in the cleanest typography; Helvetica has
become pornographic. ^^^^Q 17,1 Imagine a Hollywood movie about the Bible, A
city somewhere in the Holy Land. Market scene: from left and right extras cloaked in
colorful rags, furs, silken robes walk into the frame yelling, gesticulating, rolling their
eyes, starting fights, laughing, scratching their beards, hairpieces dripping with glue,
thronging toward the center of the image waving sticks, fists, overturning stalls, tram-
pling animals...People shout. Selling wares? Proclaiming futures? Invoking Gods?
Purses are snatched, criminals pursued (or is it helped?) by the crowds. Priests pray for
calm. Children run amok in an undergrowth of legs and robes. Animals bark. Statues top-
ple. Women shriek—threatened? Ecstatic? The churning mass becomes oceanic. Waves
break. Now switch off the sound—silence, a welcome relief— and reverse the film. The
now mute but still visibly agitated men and women stumble backward; the viewer no
longer registers only humans but begins to note spaces between them. The center emp-
ties; the last shadows evacuate the rectangle of the picture frame, probably complaining,
but fortunately we don't hear them. Silence is now reinforced by emptiness: the image
shows empty stalls, some debris that was trampled underfoot. Relief... it's over. That is
the story of the city. The city is no longer. We can leave the theater now... 1994
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